by Laura Marney
‘Eh… aye.’
A second’s hesitation, if that. But it’s enough to chill Pierce.
‘Is she okay?’
‘Aye, fine son, she’s just having a wee lie down, I’ll go and give her a shout.’
‘Don’t disturb her, Sean…’
‘No, it’s no bother, she told me to get her up for the lottery anyway. So, how
comes you’re not out tonight? It’s not like you.’
‘Well I had a big night last night. Thought I’d take it easy tonight. Two nights out in a row, I can’t do it anymore.’
‘Aye, it catches up with you eventually.’
Pierce doesn’t want to dwell on how his social life is killing him.
‘And how’s the refrigeration plant doing then, Sean, is it up and running?’
‘Oh aye, we’ve had it on-stream for over a month now.’
It amuses Pierce that his Uncle Sean, the woolly-jumpered island fisherman, uses the expression ‘on-stream.’
‘A couple of wee technical hitches at first but it’s going fine now. Aye, here’s your Auntie Bernie now, I’ll just put her on.’
‘Oh son, thanks very much for the lovely book you sent me, The Big Apple,’
is the first thing Bernie says.
‘The photos in it were smashing, especially the Manhattan ones.’
Years ago Bernie had purchased a Hoover vacuum cleaner as a surprise for her husband. What was most surprising was that the Hoover entitled them to two free flights to destinations throughout the world, but there was no need to consult the atlas. Bernie knew exactly where she wanted to go: New York.
It still occasionally rankled with Pierce that Bernie and Sean had abandoned him that summer, leaving him three weeks in Glasgow with his parents. The longest three weeks of his life. And when they got back and Pierce finally joined them, all Bernie could do was talk about Manhattan.
‘You know it just took me back there. I was looking at the pages and there I was, walking the streets again.’
Pierce has heard her New York stories a million times but he never tires of them, not because they are so riveting but because, even now, despite her illness, her pleasure in telling them makes her shine. He can hear it in her voice.
New York had been by no means a luxury trip. Money was tight and the exchange rate hadn’t been in their favour. They found a cheap hotel, which didn’t seem too dirty or dangerous and spun out their spending money by walking or taking the subway around the city. Bernie seems almost proud to tell him that they walked past the swanky restaurants and lived on hot dogs and coffee from street vendors. They preferred hot dogs, she always says. But they didn’t really need money. There were plenty of things to do, walking only cost shoe leather, the views were free and so were Central Park and some of the museums.
Although they couldn’t afford it, Bernie insisted on bringing home gifts for friends in the village to prove that they had actually been there, the only people from this small island, she is fond of saying, ever to have visited that one. She skipped hot dog dinners to buy plastic models of the Empire State building and snow domes of the Statue of Liberty.
‘Oh, the picture of the statue is fantastic, Pierce, I haven’t got one of it from that angle.’
It was the Statue of Liberty that had the greatest impact on Bernie. Its majesty and beauty had a profound effect on her. Sean says it was the first and only time in her life that she shut up talking. Bernie herself confirms that she was very quiet during their long visit to the statue. While they queued to go up, and all the way on the ferry back, she never said a word.
Back home she told everybody that up close it was actually a pale green colour, made of copper, the biggest copper sculpture in all of America. She insisted that Sean rename his boat, scraping off the faded white paint inscribed The Lady Bernadette and replacing it with much bigger fancier lettering The Statue of Liberty.
On their return the living room in their tiny croft house became a shrine to all things New York. Pride of place above the fireplace was given to the big poster of the statue she had bought in the gift shop and carried it as hand luggage rolled in a towel on the plane and train and boat home.
Pierce remembers his dismay when, as soon as she came back, she began talking about their next trip as though it would be happening soon. She tried to buy another Hoover but the special offer had finished and was never repeated. Her kitchen cupboards became filled with unlabelled tins and cut up breakfast cereal packets as she enthusiastically entered competition after competition to win another trip to New York. It never happened. And then she became ill.
‘You shouldn’t have done it, Pierce son,’ she berates him. ‘That book must have cost a fortune; you can’t afford stuff like that. It’s not even my birthday or anything.’
‘Och, it was nothing, Bernie.’
It was an expensive book, even for Oxfam, and in pristine condition.
‘Well, that was very kind of you son, greatly appreciated, wasn’t it, Sean? Sean says greatly appreciated too. But anyway, what’s going on? Why are you phoning on a Saturday night?’
Chapter 11
For some strange reason Daphne wakes up in a good mood. She’s had a lovely dream and lies enjoying the rare sensation of joy for a few moments before reality must inevitably kick her in the teeth. The dream reminds her of a day when she and Donnie went to the beach and she manages to extend the pleasurable sensation by re-running in her mind that perfect day.
It was that deliciously uncommon luxury, a hot day in the Highlands, and they had the green-blue of the water and the vast expanse of virgin sand all to themselves. Donnie was agitated because Daphne wanted to strip off there and then. Someone, somewhere, with a long-range lens, perhaps hiding in the marshy clumps of heather that stretched for miles behind them, might try to take photos of Daphne’s big white naked arse.
But he couldn’t stop her once she was in the water. Squealing like a teenager, she pulled the wet sticky costume off and swung it above her head. She jumped and dived, white arse up and over, imagining herself a mermaid. The chill of the air and the water on her naked skin excited her and excited Donnie too. The salty water didn’t inhibit her lady juice, it made it thicker, more slippery. Daphne tugged at his shorts and, reasoning that the photographer’s lens – high-powered though it may be – couldn’t record their underwater shenanigans, Donnie let her. As the shorts floated at his side Daphne fumbled between his legs and, just to scare him, pushed him from behind.
‘Up periscope!’ she laughed as his cock and belly broke the surface. As they discovered, the water supported any number of positions, some romantic, some erotic and some just plain silly. It was a wonderful day. Daphne will never do sea sex again, she’ll never do any kind of sex again. She is old now. And her brief joy melts away.
The first leaf on the tree has opened. Actually at least six of them are open but only one is within reach of her window. The spring sunshine lights their new green like traffic lights, green for go.
Daphne loves spring. Every year she celebrates the end of winter by taking part in every spring ritual she can think of and makes up some of her own. She vigorously cleans the house and packs away her cheery red and green winter cushion covers, replacing them with lilac and pale yellow ones. On Pancake Tuesday she makes pancakes, getting the ready-mixed stuff at Asda and ambitiously flipping large floppy undercooked dods of batter around the kitchen. She buys daffodils and hyacinths and plants them in bright yellow plastic pots. She paints boiled eggs and gives them out to her students; she bakes hot cross buns for the staff. And every year for the past five years, she has made a ceremonial present of the first new leaf off the tree for Donnie.
This year she has done none of these things. It’s half past three in the afternoon and Daphne isn’t dressed yet. Unwashed and unconcerned for personal hygiene, she slobs around in her nightie and purple dressing gown. Spring has sprung and she’s missed it. The season has started without her.
*
Pierce is sick of knockbacks from wanks who graduated from posh English universities and don’t get what he’s about. Or they do get what he’s about and it scares them. Either way, he isn’t one of their clique and they refuse to publish him. But Poyumtree will. No more email submissions to slush piles that never get read, no more expensive photocopying, mailing and fruitlessly waiting, no more sipping vinegar wine at shitey readings, pretending to laugh at the obscure literary jokes made by hairy-faced, elbow-patched, Arts Council-funded wanks. They’ll schmooze him now.
Except he’s not sure how he’s going to fit it all in. Pierce McCormack is a busy man. He’s not one for lying in bed wasting the day, usually he’s up for at least nine or half nine but by the time he faffs about the house it’s time to go to the gym. He freely acknowledges himself to be a man of poetry, intellect, dreams, ideas and philosophy but this shouldn’t and doesn’t, preclude the corporeal. In the gym he loves the feeling of circumspectly, successfully, returning the weight to the bar, the sweet, relaxing, muscle tiredness. Through all the sweating and grunting he knows the tears in the muscles will repair and get bigger, make him stronger. And anyway, he enjoys sweating and grunting. It’s a good way to work up a thirst.
He likes all kinds of sweat, for instance the sweat that breaks out on his top lip and forehead with a good vindaloo contrasting with the freezing fizz of the lager in his throat. He loves the gulab jamin and ice cream and coffee and After Eight mints. Pierce’s dad has retired and, for the price of his company, the old man often meets him and treats him to a businessman’s lunch at the Indian.
Sometimes, as Pierce rarely cooks, he just buys a big healthy bag of fruit, but more often than not he’ll be so hungry by the time he leaves the pub that he’ll need a Big Mac or a sausage supper. That’s why he has to go to the gym. What with the curries and the big Macs and the pints, if he didn’t train, he’d have to cart his belly around in a wheelbarrow.
The other kind of sweat Pierce likes is the kind to be had from a right good sex sesh. Because he has such a hairy chest he sweats a lot in the act of making love to a lady. But it’s not only on his head that he’s losing hair. With a bit of energetic up and down he sheds hair like nobody’s business. The girl he shagged the other night ended up with almost as much chest hair as he had. She looked like Tarzan by the time they were finished. She was nice, she said she liked muscles on a man and a hairy chest and she never mentioned the bald patch. It’s a pity she was married. Pierce started a piece about her. He’s working on a collection of romantic poems, writing one for every girl he humps. It’s called For all the Girls I’ve Loved Before. He thinks it’s a pretty good title but he can’t help thinking that he’s heard it somewhere else. It could be Poyumtree’s inaugural publication. But he needs time to write.
Pierce has always to guard his RAT time, his reading and thinking time; so many demands are made upon him. He’s always scooshing about like a burst hose. He feels duty bound to attend readings and book launches, even where there are few networking opportunities there is usually free drink and ladies to be pulled. If it’s not business meetings with Tam or lunch with his dad, it’s Wednesday night Poets and Pints, or Thursday afternoon reading group or the gym or the fucking buroo.
The buroo is getting to be real nuisance. Not content with him signing on every bloody week, now they want him to attend some stupid Restart interview. They’re threatening to stop his money and he’s running out of strategies. It was okay when Miss McLaren was in charge of his case. She’d haul him in at some ungodly hour in the morning for one of her wee chats but he’d show her some phoney job applications along with a haiku he’d written for her and she was quite happy. And quite fit for a woman of fifty. He would have given her one but Pierce feared it would spoil their professional relationship. As it turned out, he missed his chance because Miss McLaren was transferred. Now he has some hairy-arsed hot shot with the unshakeable belief that everyone is employable. The guy actually had the cheek to ask Pierce if he was embarrassed to be living off the state. Pierce replied that the state would have no problem living off him when the time came; taking fifty per cent of his income in taxes once his book was published.
As he turns the corner into the street Pierce is preoccupied with how he can get this guy off his case and get on with the work of being a poet. He has a Restart appointment with him tomorrow morning. It’s not going to be easy, the guy is a fucking terrier. Then he sees Daphne, her purple goonie cracking in the sharp spring wind. At first he thinks she must be washing the windows, she always does mad things at this time of year. He stops and watches her for a moment. She’s just sitting there. There’s no sign of cleaning; she hasn’t got a cloth or water or anything. Then it dawns on him. Oh no, the stupid depressive cow is trying to top herself.
Chapter 12
‘Daphne!’
She looks up but only gives him one of her ‘you’re-shit-on-my-shoe’ stares.
‘Daphne, stop!’
She doesn’t even look at him this time. Ah fuck her, he thinks, but it only lasts a second. He can’t bear the idea of Daphne, of anyone, splattered all over the pavement.
He takes the stairs two at a time. His heart is pumping, he’s buzzing with excitement. Pierce has been waiting all his life for this moment, the moment when he saves someone’s life. She’s not really going to kill herself. He’s going to talk her down. Pierce is the best man for the job. He, better than anyone, can explain to her how beautiful life is. As a poet he does it every day.
This is going to be all over the papers. POET RESCUES SUICIDE. ‘Pierce’s poetry saved my life’ says local woman. They’ll be queuing up to offer him a publishing deal. He’ll need an agent, a London agent. It’s a pity Daphne doesn’t smoke because he could give her a fag and when she leans in for a light he could grab her and pull her to safety.
He rattles her letter box and immediately sees that this is stupid, she’s on the window ledge, she’s hardly likely to answer the door. He’ll have to break it down. He rams his shoulder into the door. It’s fucking sore and the door doesn’t give an inch. The hot flush of excitement is quickly cooling to fear. What if he’s too late? That selfish cow better wait. He steps back along the corridor and takes a run at it, bracing himself for the pain. He rushes at the door with all the energy and life force that Daphne is about to squander.
The door opens. But Pierce’s energy and life force is irresistible. It carries him on, past Daphne, along the hall until it meets an immoveable object, the inside wall. The pain in his shoulder makes him shake from the inside out. Pierce slides down the wall whimpering as Daphne stands over him.
‘Pierce, what the hell are you doing? Are you drunk?’
Pierce can’t reply. He’d like to reply, he’s like to tell the fucking bitch… but he can’t, the pain in his shoulder is demanding all of his attention.
‘Are you okay?’
Obviously he’s not fucking okay. He’s lying in her hallway in excruciating agony but it’s just like Daphne to ask a question like that.
‘Can you stand? Here, let me help you.’
Help from Daphne is the last thing Pierce wants. Not only has she spoiled his chances of a publishing deal, now she’s made him break his shoulder.
‘Have you hurt yourself?’
Duh! He thinks.
‘Hmmm,’ he nods.
‘You need to sit down, your face is chalk white. Come into the living room.’
Stand up, sit down, the bitch is torturing him, but he lets her lead him into the living room. When he goes to sit down a new even sorer pain starts up. He has to go to
the hospital.
‘Daphne, phone an ambulance,’ he whispers hoarsely, he can’t feel or move his right arm.
‘Pierce…’
‘I’ve broken my fucking shoulder. Would you please just phone an ambulance?’
‘Really? You’ve broken your shoulder?’
Pierce means to just say ‘yeah’ manfully, but he’s nodding his head and it’s coming out like a baby’s cry.
‘Oh for God’s sake! What the hell were you playing at, running in here like a madman?’
This is too much. Indignation gives Pierce his voice back.
‘What the hell was I playing at? What the fucking hell were you playing at, Miss Hanging Off The Windowsill? Miss Melodrama? Miss I’ve Been Chucked And Life’s Not Worth Living? Miss, Miss…!’
‘I was not hanging off the windowsill! I was sitting on it. And I most certainly was not trying to kill myself; I can’t believe you thought that.’
They sit in silence for a moment, Pierce wanting only that she’ll make the call. He doesn’t give a shit anymore what she was doing.
‘No, actually, sorry. I can. Yes, I suppose someone who’s been a bit fed up, sitting on a window ledge, it might look bad, but honestly, I was only trying to get a leaf from the tree, that’s all I was doing.’
‘A leaf from the tree?’
‘Yeah, I do it every year, I pick the first leaf and give… er, I … That’s why you were banging the door, you were trying to save me.’
Pierce nods. Now she gets it, now she’ll phone.
‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, Pierce.’
Daphne comes towards him and takes his head in her hands. Pierce has never noticed before what nice bouncy tits Daphne has. He’s sure she never had them before, he would have noticed. Despite her purple goonie he has a great view from this angle.
‘Just phone, Daphne, please? And get me the strongest painkillers you’ve got.’